The main characteristics of Agile software development include iterative and incremental development, adaptability to changing requirements, customer collaboration, frequent delivery of working software, continuous feedback and improvement, and close team collaboration. Agile development emphasizes transparency, evidence-based decisions, built-in quality, simplicity, and a sustainable pace throughout the project.
Rather than relying on a fixed plan from beginning to end, Agile teams review their work as the project develops and use what they learn to guide the next stage. This allows the software and development approach to evolve alongside customer needs, business priorities, and new information. Let’s look at these characteristics of Agile software development in more detail.
What Is Agile Software Development?
Agile software development is a flexible approach to software development through shorter development cycles with regular feedback and continuous adjustment. In simple terms, agile describes the overall way of thinking and working, not a single methodology or framework. It’s an umbrella approach or mindset, and different Agile approaches put these ideas into practice in different ways. For example, Scrum is an Agile framework, and Kanban is an Agile method. On the other hand, Extreme Programming (XP) is an Agile methodology or software development approach that is built around specific engineering practices.
What Are the Characteristics of Agile Software Development?
Agile does not offer one official list of characteristics. However, several broad characteristics of agile consistently describe agile software development in practice. Here is an overview of the agile characteristics.
Iterative and Incremental Development
Agile software development builds the product in small and usable increments through repeated development cycles. Here, each increment adds to the existing product, and each cycle lets the team review work and make further changes. However, iterative development and incremental development are not identical. Iterative development means revisiting and improving the product as the team learns. In contrast, incremental development means adding new functionality piece by piece. Agile teams can develop and refine software throughout the project.
Adaptability to Changing Requirements
In agile software development, agile teams keep the work flexible enough to review priorities and adjust upcoming development as the project demands. However, it doesn’t mean accepting any change in software development without consideration. The development team first reviews new information and decides its effect on the product and the work ahead. For example, in Scrum, the Product Backlog is an emergent, ordered list of work needed to improve the product. Its contents can change as the team learns more throughout development.
Customer Collaboration and Customer-Centric Development
Customer needs always remain the main focus in the agile project. During the project, the team involves customers and stakeholders as the product develops and uses their feedback to guide priorities and decisions. This keeps development connected to the people who will use or benefit from the software. As the team learns more about customer needs, they can refine existing features and reconsider priorities.
Frequent Delivery of Working Software
Agile software development teams generally focus on delivering working software frequently instead of releasing a final completed project. The Agile Manifesto describes frequent delivery as a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference for the shorter timescale. However, the exact delivery schedule can vary depending on the Agile approaches.
Continuous Feedback and Improvement
Agile development uses regular feedback to refine both the software and the way the team works. Customers and stakeholders have an opportunity to review progress through working software. On the other hand, the team can use the feedback to adjust upcoming work. Regular feedback on the project also helps the team identify problems in its process and make improvements for the next cycle. It creates an ongoing cycle of feedback, learning, adjustment, and improvement.
Collaborative and Self-Organizing Teams
Agile teams ensure that the skills needed to develop the product are within the same working team. In Scrum, for example, the team includes a Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers. In an agile development project, the teams are generally cross-functional, so their members collectively have the skills needed to create value. On top of that, the teams are also self-managing. That means team members decide who does what, when, and how. This gives the team responsibility for organising and adapting its own work.
Transparency and Open Communication
Agile teams keep the important information clear and accessible to the team members involved in the project work. It includes progress, priorities, decisions, problems, and changes. This open communication helps developers, product representatives, and other stakeholders maintain a shared understanding. Moreover, regular communication make easier to raise problems early and discuss them closely.
Empirical and Evidence-Based Decision-Making
Empirical decision-making relies on what the team can observe and verify during development. Instead of assuming that the initial plan will always remain correct, the teams use actual results to understand the current situation. For example, Scrum has three empirical pillars.
- Transparency makes the available information clear
- Inspection helps examine the work and its progress
- Adaptation allows changes
Built-in Quality and Technical Excellence
Quality assurance always remains a part of the development process throughout an Agile project. Quality assurance practices such as continuous testing, code review, refactoring, and automated testing help identify quality issues during development. Good software design and maintainable code also make future changes easier.
Simplicity and Focus on Customer Value
Agile development gives priority to work that delivers real value to the customer. In Agile, simplicity means avoiding unnecessary work and focusing effort on the functionality that is necessary. The Agile Manifesto describes simplicity as maximizing the amount of work not done. This characteristic of agile development keeps the development work focused on useful outcomes and prevents teams from wasting time on something unnecessary.
Sustainable Development
Lastly, a sustainable pace keeps software development manageable. In software development, constant overtime and excessive workloads can lead to fatigue and mistakes. A sustainable development approach helps teams maintain a steady pace. It supports continued delivery and improvement without relying on repeated periods of intense work.
What Are the 4 Values and 12 Principles of Agile?
In agile software development, the 4 values and 12 principles of Agile are the core guidelines. They define what agile teams value and how they should approach development, change, or delivery.
Here is a quick overview of the 4 values and 12 principles of agile software development.
The 4 Values of the Agile Manifesto:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
The 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto:
| No | Principles | Simple Overview |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Customer satisfaction through early delivery | Deliver valuable software early and continuously. |
| 2 | Welcome changing requirements | Adapt to changing requirements, even late in development. |
| 3 | Deliver working software frequently | Release working software in short, regular cycles. |
| 4 | Business and developers must collaborate daily | Keep business and development teams closely connected. |
| 5 | Build projects around motivated individuals | Give teams the support, trust, and environment they need. |
| 6 | Face-to-face communication is best | Use direct conversation for effective communication. |
| 7 | Working software is the primary measure of progress | Measure progress primarily through working software. |
| 8 | Maintain a sustainable development pace | Maintain a steady pace that can continue long term. |
| 9 | Continuous attention to technical excellence | Maintain technical quality and good design throughout development. |
| 10 | Simplicity is essential | Avoid unnecessary work and focus on what matters. |
| 11 | Self-organizing teams deliver best results | Give teams autonomy to shape their work and solutions. |
| 12 | Regular reflection and improvement | Review how the team works and make improvements regularly. |
What Is the Difference Between Agile Characteristics and Agile Practices?
Agile characteristics describe the qualities of an agile approach, whereas agile practices are specific ways a team applies those qualities during software development.
For example, adaptability, collaboration, customer focus, and continuous improvement are agile characteristics. But iterative development, frequent delivery, customer feedback, and retrospectives are practices that can support them.
What Are the Characteristics of Major Agile Frameworks?
Let’s check out the characteristics of major agile frameworks below.
Scrum
Scrum organizes iterative product development through fixed-length sprints of one month or less. In Scrum, every sprint generally has specific goals and uses an ordered Product Backlog to guide the work. The Scrum Team includes three accountabilities: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers.
Developers create a usable Increment during the Sprint and rely on transparency, inspection, and adaptation throughout the work. The Sprint Review examines the outcome with stakeholders, and the Sprint Retrospective helps the team identify improvements for the next Sprint.
Kanban
Kanban ensures a transparent workflow through its Kanban board. It gives the team a shared view of work items and their movement through the workflow. Plus, WIP limits restrict the number of items in progress and support a pull system. That’s why the team starts new work when capacity becomes available.
In Kanban, Teams monitor flow through measures like work item age and cycle time and use regular feedback to spot delays. Moreover, Kanban supports evolutionary improvement that allows the teams to change workflow as needs change.
Extreme Programming (XP)
Extreme Programming uses frequent development cycles and regular releases to keep feedback close to the development work. Its practices cover planning, technical work, integration, and team organisation. Pair programming, test-first programming, incremental design, refactoring, and collective code ownership are among its technical practices. XP also uses user stories, short planning cycles, continuous integration, and incremental deployment.
Crystal
As for Crystal, it is a family of methodologies. It puts people and communication at the centre of software development. The approach keeps development processes lightweight. That is why teams can spend more time communicating and delivering useful software.
However, the level of process can also change with the project context, and team size and project criticality are important factors in this choice. Smaller/less critical projects can use lighter practices, and larger/more critical projects may need greater control.
Lean Software Development
Lean Software Development is an adoption of lean manufacturing principles and practices in software development. It mainly focuses on delivering customer value with less waste that doesn’t contribute to customer value. The approach builds quality into development and treats software work as a continuous learning process.
Teams keep important decisions open until enough information is available and then deliver in small batches. This way, lean software development principles optimize the whole value stream. As a result, improving one activity can’t create problems elsewhere.
Feature-Driven Development (FDD)
Feature-Driven Development (FDD) was developed to meet the specific needs of larger development projects. The development starts with an overall domain model organizing a project around five processes or activities that are performed iteratively. They are
- Develop an overall model,
- Build a features list,
- Plan by feature,
- Design by feature, and
- Build by features.
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
DSDM keeps software development related to business needs and active user involvement. The approach develops solutions iteratively through fixed-duration timeboxes that last for two to four weeks. Eight principles generally guide the DSDM framework.
- Focus on the business needs.
- Deliver on time.
- Collaborate.
- Never compromise quality.
- Build incrementally from firm foundations.
- Develop iteratively.
- Communicate continuously and clearly.
- Demonstrate control
Scrumban
Scrumban combines structured planning of Scrum and visual workflow of Kanban. Here, the work board makes tasks and their current stages clear, and WIP limits control the amount of work in progress. In this approach, the team uses a pull-based system. That is why new work starts as capacity becomes available.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
SAFe coordinates multiple Agile teams through Agile Release Trains (ARTs). It generally contains 5–12 Agile teams who work towards the same goal. In this approach, teams plan and deliver work through Program Increments (PIs) that last 8–12 weeks. Moreover, Lean Portfolio Management connects strategy, funding, and execution at the portfolio level.
What Does an Agile Software Development Environment Look Like?
An Agile software development environment supports flexible and collaborative product development. Teams work on the product in smaller stages and make improvements during development.
- Collaborative and Cross-Functional Teams: Agile teams work closely together instead of keeping development-related work in separate silos. People with different skills, like developers, testers, designers, and business or product team members, collaborate closely and work on the same product. For example, when developing a new e-commerce feature, the team can discuss the requirements, build it, test it, and address the problem together.
- Transparent Work and Communication: An agile software development environment keeps the work, priorities, progress, and problems transparent to all team members. As the cross-functional teams share work items, progress updates, and ensure regular communication, the environment helps everyone stay informed about the project and its current priorities. Like if the developer finds a problem in the project that could delay a feature, the team can discuss it openly and can discuss how to address it.
- Continuous Feedback: In agile software development, feedback comes throughout the project. Here, working software lets customers and stakeholders review it. That’s why their feedback can help the team improve the product during development. A new checkout feature on an e-commerce website, for instance, may work as intended but still confuse users. Their feedback can show the team which part of the process needs improvement.
- Adaptable Requirements: Requirements in the software development project can change as the team learns more about the product or customer needs. In an agile environment, the team can review and adjust the planned work instead of taking the original requirements as fixed.
- Frequent Delivery and Continuous Improvement: Agile development focuses on delivering working software in small and regular increments. That’s why after each delivery, teams can review the software, feedback, and development process to identify the issues that need attention. This allows the team to make continuous improvements throughout the project instead of waiting until the end.
What Are the Benefits of Agile Software Development?
Agile software development helps teams deliver value more efficiently, adapting to changing needs.
- Faster Delivery of Customer Value: As agile teams deliver software in smaller increments, customers can therefore receive useful features earlier and start benefiting from them.
- Greater Responsiveness to Change: In agile projects, teams can review priorities and adjust upcoming work as customer needs, business goals, and new information change.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Regular delivery and customer feedback keep the software development connected to actual user needs.
- Better Software Quality: Frequent development, testing, and review help teams identify quality issues throughout the development process. It ultimately reduces defects and improves software before release.
- Earlier Problem and Risk Detection: Smaller development cycles in the agile project make problems visible sooner. Teams can identify issues early when there is still time to address them.
- Improved Team Collaboration: Agile encourages regular communication between people involved in developing the product. It enhances understanding, reduces communication gaps, and makes decisions faster.
- Continuous Product Improvement: Agile teams can use feedback, development results, and changing requirements to improve the product throughout its lifecycle.
